I was working on the rock paper scissors exercise from handout 1 (ex. 1.7). When I tried to run an early version of the program it gave me an empty prompt above the first raw_input statement and I had to hit return to get the program to proceed. There was no visible code causing this, but when I eliminated a few empty lines at the top of the program, the problem resolved and it went straight to the first raw_input. Anybody know what caused this and how to avoid it? It really threw me.

Question

I was working on the rock paper scissors exercise from handout 1 (ex. 1.7).  When I tried to run an early version of the program it gave me an empty prompt above the first raw_input statement and I had to hit return to get the program to proceed.  There was no visible code causing this, but when I eliminated a few empty lines at the top of the program, the problem resolved and it went straight to the first raw_input.  Anybody know what caused this and how to avoid it?  It really threw me.

anonymous · Answer

I'm not totally certain; but I can conjure a guess that it has to do with Python's use of white space.